ARTS/ARTIFACTS

ARTS/ARTIFACTS; A Japanese Vision of the Ancient World

By RITA REIF

Published: August 16, 1998

KYOTO, Japan—
IN 1991, after collecting objects for the Japanese tea ceremony for 40 years, Mihoko Koyama switched to buying ancient and medieval art for the world-class museum she envisioned building on a mountaintop near here. Frail and in a wheelchair, Mrs. Koyama, an heiress to a textile fortune, moved quietly but with tornado force through the ancient art market.

Over the next six years she collected 300 works produced in China, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Greece, Rome and Egypt, buying several times a year at the galleries of prominent dealers in Europe and the United States. Many were masterpieces, like an Assyrian limestone relief, depicting a winged deity and a royal attendant, that she bought from a dealer in 1994 after it was auctioned at Christie's in London for $11.9 million, a record for ancient art.

The antiquities and the tea ceremony artifacts are exhibited in the Miho Museum, a stone, steel, glass and concrete structure named after its creator and designed by I. M. Pei, in the town of Shigaraki, 20 miles east of Kyoto. (The cost of the land, art and building was about three-quarters of a billion dollars.) The site is near the headquarters of Shinji Shumeikai, or Shumei Family, the religious group that Mrs. Koyama, now 88, founded in 1970. Its 300,000 members believe that contemplating beauty in art and nature brings spiritual fulfillment.

The change in Mrs. Koyama's art collecting came after a conversation with Mr. Pei.

''I'm afraid I'm partly to blame for Mrs. Koyama's shift in collecting,'' he said. ''I looked at the pieces she wanted in the museum and 90 percent were Japanese tea ceremony objects. Since many museums in Japan have such collections, I wondered why people would come a long way to see this museum.''

Mr. Pei said that Mrs. Koyama had seemed to understand and asked him for suggestions. ''Why not turn your eyes to the West,'' he said, ''not to the West of Van Gogh, but to the West which was a source for ancient Japanese art. Look West to Buddhism, to the Silk route, to ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt.''

Mrs. Koyama enlisted the help of Noriyoshi Horiuchi, a Tokyo dealer in ancient art who transformed her vision into a reality. He introduced Mrs. Koyama and her daughter, Hiroko, to dealers like Giuseppe Eskenazi and Robin Symes in London and James J. Lally and Edward Merrin in New York. Mr. Horiuchi preselected the works for Mrs. Koyama: Chinese bronzes, Sassanian silver vessels, Egyptian wood carvings, Roman mosaics and Persian lusterware.

While confident in her choices, Mrs. Koyama, who speaks little English, relied on experts to confirm her judgment. ''She didn't say much, a word or two, like 'beautiful,' 'wonderful,' 'excellent,' '' Mr. Horiuchi said. ''She didn't ask the history, the background or the price of the objects.''

When she admired a piece, said Mr. Eskenazi, the dealer, ''she expressed her great excitement by her wonderful benign smile.'' It was a smile he was to see many times as Mrs. Koyama returned frequently to his gallery to buy at least 27 pieces, including Chinese stone sculpture, inlaid bronzes and a Tang tomb figure of a pottery court lady with a haunting smile.

CHOOSING the objects was easy for Mrs. Koyama and her team. What was difficult was authenticating the works. The field of antiquities is plagued by forgeries and illegally excavated objects. But Mr. Horiuchi was well aware of these problems. ''We bought only from major dealers,'' he said. ''And we invited museum curators, scholars, collectors, restorers and dealers to look at the collection and urged everyone to tell us of any problems they saw.''

He also had all of the objects analyzed in museum laboratories, most of them by Pieter Meyers, the head of the Conservation Center of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Of the 300 pieces studied, 8 were not authenticated and were removed from the collection.

In their travels, Mrs. Koyama and her daughter met with directors, curators and conservators from New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Berlin and St. Petersburg to arrange future loans of art works from the collection.

In 1996, an exhibition of 80 works, ''Ancient Art from the Shumei Family Collection,'' opened at the Metropolitan Museum and later moved to the Los Angeles County Museum. Last November, the movers and shakers in ancient art gathered for the opening of the Miho.

''Collecting art is an ancient tradition in Japan,'' Mr. Horiuchi said. ''As early as the eighth century, the Japanese received gifts of Persian art from Chinese emperors and continued to collect. Then, and once again now, the Japanese are eager to import art and knowledge from China and Europe.''

Photos: THE NEAR WEST -- A Tang pottery figure of a smiling court lady comes from ninth-century China; MASTERPIECES -- The Miho Museum's collection includes this Assyrian relief, which sold at auction for $11.9 million. (Photographs Courtesy Miho Museum)